Mylenium noted that GridIron shipped Nucleo Pro 2, a significant upgrade to their plug-in and background render manager for AE. He added that "In addition to creating pre-composition proxies now, it also features support for a selection of 3D programs to also add to the background render queue." Nucleo Pro 2 will make you feel less envious of previewing features of Combustion or even Motion.

iPhoto provides an easy way (exporting a slideshow) to make a movie with the Ken Burns effect on a ton of pictures. Adobe has nothing like it as far as I can tell -- unless you're making a DVD then Encore has a slideshow feature.

Now, there's a new FxPlug filter that does something similar, though besides a few transitions I can't tell right now what Image Flow FX has over iPhoto, and it might be missing features. For more check out The Editblog's review of Image Flow Fx.

Andrew Kramer has a large collection of good-looking, mostly free video tutorials for After Effects at Creative Cow and at Video Copilot, his own site. His team has been on a roll lately with something new every week.

John Nack posts on typographic goodies, including this: "The Photoshop Roadmap blog pulls together tutorials for The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web. 'This guide includes 78 Photoshop tutorials and 2 impressive collections of Photoshop Actions, plus 3 books on the subject.' [Via PhotoshopSsupport.com]"

July 23, 2007

Bill Moyers talks with "two partners of Triglyceride Investments, a private equity fund that recently announced its intention of combining the assets of all the hedge funds on Wall Street in order to bring under a single canopy of ownership every media outlet in America. Their prospectus contends that the handful of big media companies that control most of what you see, hear, and read cannot possibly produce maximum return on investment as long as each has to field its own army of lobbyists in Washington.

If only one holding company instead of four or five controlled all the country's radio and television stations and all of its cable, newspaper, and Internet outlets, eliminating the need for the competitive purchase of politicians, the savings on campaign contributions alone would increase the bottom line tenfold.

Not the least of their argument is that since our present media system and Washington so closely mirror each others' interests, it could even be possible to close down the government altogether and have the country run by Wall Street, saving huge sums of money now spent on perpetuating an impression to the contrary. Joining me are Andy Bichlbaum, the chairman of Triglyceride Investments, and his partner, Mike Bonanno, chief executive of their offshore subsidiary, Tsetse Media Inc., with headquarters in the Marianas Islands."

Those two systems are owned by the mobile unit vendor, Game Creek Video. Obviously it would be cooler if they were on a SAN, but they have GigE between them, and copy files they need across that connection.

The Sunday Night Football show on NBC is probably the most robust FCS system working in trucks. Both are Mac Pros and they are on a SAN. Not sure of the specifics.

Other shows that have FCS systems:- ESPN Sunday Night Baseball- ESPN Monday Night Baseball- Monday Night Football- Sunday Night Football- The primary ESPN/ABC college football shows on Thursdays and Saturdays in the Fall- FOX and CBS NFL A show and B show

Adobe has released the AE CS3 SDK, which contains concise explanations of APIs as well as sample projects exercising important functionality. You must be a proficient C or C++ programmer to write AE plug-ins and there are no compiled extras, but you can still look under the hood and find out what a PiPL is.

It seems like that problem might be handled more simply and specifically by not indexing kiddie porn in the first place, and then not accepting searches on those terms... they wouldn't actually need to first satisfy those search requests and then log everybody else's search terms for accountability.

Celulight is a cel shader and normal map generator for AE, and uses drawn outlines or cels as source files and allows them to be lit in a pseudo 3D environment using AE’s internal lights. Possible styles include: Classic toon shading, Modern 2.5D Toons, and “Kingdom Hearts” Styles.

Floodgate "can be considered an advanced paint bucket or fill tool" which "floods up to 64 distinct areas with up to 8 different colors. Floodgate is squarely aimed at coloring in toon and cel animation and outlines drawings, which is a real pain to do in After Effects without it."

Update: these might be fun with Live Trace versions of video...Aharon Rabinowitz had a video tutorial series on this feature, Converting Video to Cartoon.

Update 2: there's a report in comments here that this filter has problems in AE8.

Update: Stu Maschwitz posted his logic, a free project (AE/Shake/Nuke), and instructions in his postPanalog:

...it occurred to me that the format is similar enough to Cineon log that one might be able to find settings in a standard log/lin tool that match the Panavision transform.Sure enough, a little playing resulted in about 99% success. I got my Cineon log/lin conversions close enough to be within a 10-bit code value of a match to Panavision’s own LUTs.

Over at Creative Cow (master tutorial list), Andrew Kramer demonstrates how to creates 'Time Freeze' and a cool "3D room," Aharon Rabinowitz shares tips on timing video to audio among other things, and Aanarav Sareen takes a look at bins in Premiere CS3. Some of these show up in iTunes and some don't...

I like it ok in that I get free shows like KQED QUEST Science HD Video Podcasts and Democracy Now and that it plays different formats and is open source and multiplatform, but I don't like the lack of control and metadata information. Let's hope that Adobe Media Player will be more like QuickTime Player. There's Miro links and comments at John Dowdell's blog.

Alan Shisko mentioned a font thread from the AE list and a Macworld article that "neatly summarizes all the free and commercial font sites, plus links to font resources. Confirms my theory that DaFont is the first (and often only) place to go for typographic styles and inspiration."

Trish and Chris Meyer also covered fonts at CyberMotion. AE Portal may have additional items, well at least one, with Famous Fonts. I also liked another site mentioned in that AE list thread, Blue Vertigo which features links to color tools, sounds, icons, patterns and more.

July 14, 2007

You can find a quick rundown of the new-old Trapcode filter package Trapcode 3S: Shine, Starglow and 3D Stroke in the review for SF Cutters. In short, though similar filters (or Replicators or Behaviors) can be found in AE and Final Cut Studio, Trapcode's Shine, Starglow, and 3D Stroke offer more controls, unique features, and probably faster results than the built-in alternatives in Motion and After Effects. The Trapcode website has numerous additional tutorials and examples for the same filters using AE.

Adobe has many OnDemand seminars explaining new features or mostly basic aspects of various apps, including Photoshop (for video with Mike Kanfer, medical imaging), Premiere, Flash, and color management for print.

July 8, 2007

Fxguidetv episode 2 features interviews with top people on shrinking deadlines in film effects as discussed in an earlier posted story. The fxphd tip of the week takes a look at Vanishing Point in AE CS3.

The production is explained at the Fxphd blog and looks good (except for a noisy spot). Fxguidetv #001 (QT) featured a nice succinct look at Shape Layers in AE CS3.

With AE and the Production Premium suite just shipping, now is the time to make feature requests, so visit Adobe's Feature Request/Bug Report Form if you think something's missing.Bug fixes are important too and could be squeezed into a potential point release because there will probably be one before the next dot-zero release -- which might be 1-1/2 years out.

Mark Christiansen's After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques has a great discussion of film, HDR, and 32-bit compositing, but AE8 adds a few wrinkles with a complete color management workflow through Project Working Space options, to preview color and simulate final output in different mediums like broadcast monitors or film stock.

As in Photoshop, I'd keep Color Management off to avoid inadvertent color shifts from embedding or converting to default profiles unless I've worked out a specific workflow. Files embedded with Adobe default profile sRGB might sneak in, so getting color management under control for all codecs and file types might take some serious thought. I had standardized on Adobe RGB (1998) and ruthlessly convert graphics from others if they use a profile. There's even a new utility filter to convert per layer, Color Profile Converter (pictured). I don't have a firm handle on the new color management yet (I'm fine as an NTSC island) but hopefully these Adobe white papers will help clear things up: Color Management Workflow in Adobe After Effects CS3 and Color workflows for Adobe Creative Suite 3 .

Update: this is a hairy issue...according to Studio Daily, "Post Logic Studios announced the launch of its Image Science Division...[to offer]...clients “the assurance of consistent color management across every stage of a production, regardless of acquisition format or output medium.”

Update 2: On the AE-List (18 Aug 2007) Chris Meyer responded to a question about a gamma shift between AE8 and AE7, "The short answer, in most "AE CS3 does not match AE7" cases where Color Management is _not_ enabled for the project (Project Working Space = None), is to enable the Legacy Gamma switch in the Project Prefs. The long answer is...a long answer. (I'm writing that chapter this week, as a matter of fact.) The text in the Project Prefs, Interpret Footage, and Output Module dialogs help, as does the Adobe white paper..."

July 5, 2007

Adobe has a new white paper with visual explanations of some of the risks for delivering video on the Internet and how to protect content from stream capturing by Real Player and other tools using the built-in features of Flash Media Server. John Dowdell has good background and extra linked resources on this white paper, Video Content Protection with Flash Media Server.

More on the background of the Tripolitan War and this earlier song is at Triplopia, which adds: "This 'Song' was even set to the same music as 'The Defense of Fort McHenry' later called 'The Star-Spangled Banner' -- the English drinking song, 'To Anacraeon in Heaven'! So 'The Star-Spangled Banner' has its roots not in an Anglo-American war at all, but in a war with an Islamic country, so it’s interesting to see how that relates to current events."

Columbians! a band of your brothers behold,In the conflict resistless each toil they endured,... 'Till their foes fled dismayed from the war's desolation; And pale beamed the crescent, its splendor obscured By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation. Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war, And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible glare, Now mixed with the olive the laurel shall wave, And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

Our fathers who stand on the summit of fame, Shall exultantly hear of their sons the proud story, How their young bosoms glowed with the patriot flame, How they fought, how they fell, in the blaze of their glory. How triumphant they rode o'er the wondering flood, And stained the blue waters with Infidel blood; How mixed with the olive the laurel did wave, And, formed a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

July 3, 2007

Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock reviews basics of suspense, camera angles, style, and editing for "filmmakers who are sad and depressed because their movie is so average that nobody will watch it." (via Reelpop)